Inuit group to host forum on child abuse
OTTAWA—“Normalized” suicide.
The very notion is unfathomable to most Canadians, but it is the reality for Inuit communities in the Arctic, says Natan Obed, president of Canada’s national Inuit organization, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK).
“Just imagine a community where every single member of the community is intimately touched by suicide,” Obed said in an interview on Monday.
“We live in a society that is saturated with suicide.”
That reality is the backdrop for a two-day forum on child sexual abuse the ITK is hosting in Ottawa this week, a coming together of policy experts, government officials and people who have experienced abuse. Obed said there is evidence child abuse is a factor that can lead to suicide, which prompted the ITK to set up this week’s forum with some of the federal funds it received to support its national suicide prevention strategy.
That funding — $9 million over three years — runs out in March, and Obed said the aim of this week’s forum is to help policy-makers gain a clearer idea of the best practices to prevent and address the consequences of child abuse in Inuit communities. That, in turn, will serve as a springboard to request a renewal of federal funds for the ITK suicide prevention plan in next year’s federal budget, Obed said.
According to the federal government, the rate of suicide for Inuit youth is 11 times higher than the national average.
“We need to be grounded by the expertise that is out there in the world that has been trying to do something about this issue,” Obed said.
The policy forum will take place barely a month after news of a spate of youth suicides in a northern Quebec Inuit communities made headlines across the country. The director of a local Kativik school board told The Canadian Press in October that the region is facing “an emergency” in which two students had taken their own lives so far this school year. Meanwhile, the Nunatsiaq News reported Puvirnituq, a village of about 1,000 on Hudson Bay, saw 10 residents die by suicide so far in 2018. The youngest of them was 12, the website reported.